With their payroll, Nets are no underdog

Brooklyn’s Kevin Garnett, left, and Paul Pierce were all about winning a championship after they arrived from Boston.

Let’s talk a little bit about the Nets’ identity.

For the first time since the team moved to Brooklyn two years ago, the Nets played with an identity: They’ve been scrappy, a group of fighters who use small ball to outmaneuver their opponents. With that identity, they’ve played some of the best basketball in the NBA since Jan. 1.

Before the Nets found themselves, however, their first two months of the season were so bad that it allowed them to go through an identity change in the eyes of fans. Remember the team that opened the preseason with the highest payroll in basketball and big talk about competing for a championship? Yes, that was the thing many months ago.

Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce came to Brooklyn for one reason, they said, to win a championship. That’s all the Nets talked about in the preseason. And that’s what made it so difficult to fathom when they started 10-21 and became a league-wide joke.

But everything changed on that night in Oklahoma City, when Joe Johnson hit a buzzer beater and, seemingly, miraculously, the Nets found their identity.

Identity is a word the Nets like to throw around a lot.

They will head into the playoffs knowing who they are. But they also will head there without home-court advantage. In the eyes of some, that will make them underdogs. In the eyes of many, their recent success and playoff experience will make them a sleeper pick to make a playoff run.

But let’s get one thing clear: $200 million basketball teams aren’t underdogs, and they shouldn’t be sleeper picks.

It doesn’t matter how far the Nets have come since Jan. 1. It doesn’t matter who they play in the first round. They have enough talent to win. They have enough mental firepower.

And if they can’t get the job done in the first round, they’ll have a final identity for the 2013-14 season: failure.